Team Thinking Asia

Thanks to the leadership team from De Heus Myanmar for their energy on Wednesday! This was the first of 4 workshops that we are running with the team, between now and December. Workshop 1 focused upon developing deeper understanding amongst the team and exploring ways to improve cross department collaboration. We used the tool to help develop greater self-awareness. We are moving onto Strategic Thinking and Leading in Complex Environments, then Coaching Skills, and finishing with Inclusion and Psychological Safety. The day was facilitated by Ian Davies and Myat Thinzar Tun from our team.

Wishing all our friends in Myanmar a Happy Thingyan holiday.

We’re delivering the 360 feedback results to the senior leaders at Dai-ichi Life Insurance in Yangon this week and next.

As part of our longer term Team Thinking Asia leadership programme, all of the leadership team received feedback from a number of colleagues. We’ve compiled reports and are having these individual conversations with everyone to explore strengths and development areas.

360 is a useful tool, however it often fails if there is no follow up. With this in mind, we planned a series of individual coaching conversations that will start after the Thingyan holiday to help everyone grow even further, explore goals and get the support the need to move forward.

It was great to work in Laos with the Partners and Director team from VDB Loi & Andersen in Cambodia yesterday. 17 people from 4 different country offices. The workshop was led by one of our founders Ian Davies and focused upon developing everyone’s self awareness and awareness of others in the team. We used the PRISM Brain Mapping behaviour tool to help the team reflect upon their preferred styles. Lots of great discussions on working styles and ways to improve the team collaboration even further.

Thanks everyone for your energy and openness to reflect and share. And we all had a great Laos meal afterwards too!

Thanks to KBZMS General Insurance in Myanmar for asking Team Thinking Asia to design and deliver a practical workshop for their HR team yesterday, to explore Feedback and Coaching Skills.

HR departments often have to deal with many demands and requests from all directions and sometimes those conversations can be challenging.

We mixed relevant HR case studies with role plays (HR role, Manager Role and Observer), plus coaching practice around real goals or challenges.

Thanks to Zayar Ye Lin Tun for inviting us along, for everyone’s energy and willingness to practice and to our trainer Su Htra for your help during the day.

‘Coaching Skills for Managers’

Thanks to everyone who came to the Team Thinking Asia workshop on Wednesday at Inya Lake Hotel in Yangon. It was great to work with you all.

The workshop was purposefully small to help with more effective learning (no one wants a ballroom full of people sitting in rows!) and we had 14 people join from Wave Money, VDB Loi, DKSH, GGI Nippon Life, Teacher Moe, I Can Read Mandalay and MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company

It was an opportunity for everyone to develop some key coaching skills that they could immediately use at work.

Understanding what coaching is, when it’s useful to use and most importantly, some practice coaching conversations about real challenges, goals or dilemmas that they brought along with them.

Most of the group started the day with less awareness about coaching. It was great to observe them develop during the day, starting to be more comfortable to engage, listen without judgement, refrain from giving advice and ask great questions during the afternoon coaching sessions. Now it’s time for everyone to practice back at work!

If you’d like a 1-day workshop for your own team, let me know - we can run these in Myanmar or Cambodia.

We will also be running more public workshops soon.

Thanks again to the extended leadership team from Grand Royal Group International in Myanmar for a day of reflection and practice on Friday.

We called the workshop Leading with Influence.

Practical, not theoretical, working on real challenges and future ideas.

Early in the day I asked: “If the data was enough, would every new idea get approved by the CEO?” and of course, the group shook their heads.

At a senior level, decisions aren’t just about logic. They’re about risk, timing, reputation, competing priorities, trust and relationships. You can be right with the data and still get a no.

So we worked only on real situations. Lots of writing, plenty of thinking and hopefully, a fair bit of challenge too.

We explored:

- a conversation they’ve been avoiding
- a relationship that needs strengthening
- an initiative that needs buy-in from above

No case studies or hypothetical situations, just reflection, discussion and practice in pairs, threes and small groups.

The groups presented their new ideas and others challenged their thinking. What would the CEO or stakeholder question? What could go wrong? Who might resist it and why?

We finished with four personal commitments and set them up with accountability partners who’ll check in with them in 3 weeks time.

- one conversation I’ll have is…
- one relationship that I’ll strength is…
- one behaviour I’ll improve is…
- one habit I’ll stop is…

Training has to be challenging. It’s easy to design training that makes people smile (I think we had smiles during the day too!), but reality based design is harder, but that’s what senior leaders want. Not theories.

If you’re running programmes at a senior level, think about the work that they do and design around that with real actions to take away.

Thanks to Mi Mi Thet, Chief People Officer for inviting us back again to work with the group.

Only a few places left on next week’s Coaching for Managers workshop in Yangon.

25th February at Inya Lake Hotel and run by Ian Davies, one of our Directors and accredited Coach.

A highly practical day where Ian will be helping everyone explore how to have more effective coaching conversations. Not too much theory, just useful skills to implement straight away

Message us if you’d like to join or use the link in the chat to book.

We’ll be running this engaging 1-day Coaching skills workshop in Yangon, Myanmar on the 25th February. It’s designed for managers of any level, who want to start feeling more confident in coaching their team members.

It’s a great introduction to coaching and as always, will be highly practical, with opportunities to practice and take away new skills to use.

Book using the QR code on the last page, email [email protected] or use the link in the comments.

Only 15 places available!

Thanks to the Senior Management Team from Dai-ichi Life Insurance Myanmar for joining in with group coaching sessions today, run by Ian Davies, one of our Directors and accredited Coach.

These are part of the on-going leadership development programme that our Team Thinking Asia team are running for the group. We’ve spent some time last quarter exploring coaching skills and today was another opportunity to bring a real life dilemma, challenge or goal to the session. Ian wasn’t coaching the group this time, purely facilitating them coaching one another, a great opportunity to practice, discuss, gain feedback and take away some insights to use when coaching their own team members. We had most people in one meeting room in Yangon, with some in other locations and myself in Phnom Penh.

Group coaching sessions can help people to learn through shared experience, hearing how peers handle similar challenges, normalising difficulties (“it’s not just me”), sparking new ideas and perspectives and building collective problem-solving skills (this programme is all about collaboration too). Peer learning often makes insights stick far more than individual coaching alone.

One more session with another group tomorrow morning and then we will run the session again in a few weeks.